PAL HDV to SD Parameters

Lou van Wijhe wrote on 11/4/2008, 6:18 AM

I shoot HDV and put it on BD for my own use. For others I want to downsample to SD in Vegas and put it on DVD. For downsampling I plan to use the "DVD Architect PAL Widescreen video stream" template and customize it as follows:

1. Video rendering quality: Best
2. Field order: Upper field first (to match the HDV field order)
3. Color primaries, etc. all changed to ITU-R Rec. 709 (also to match HDV)

Anything else I should think of?

TIA,
Lou

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Lou van Wijhe wrote on 11/11/2008, 4:59 AM

My findings about Vegas and the MainConcept plugin were partly erroneous. I did examine the test footage using Cyberlink PowerDVD 8 but the quivering and shivering I found appeared to be introduced by PowerDVD itself, maybe because of a malfunctioning MPEG-2 decoder (wrong scan pattern?). Moreover, the luminance values below 16 and over 235 appeared to be remapped correctly by Vegas/MainConcept into the range 16-235. This only became visible after viewing the footage in the freeware VLC Media Player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/).

However, the problem with the footage looking too dark remained. Of course, the specific camcorder (mine is a Canon HV20) might also play a rol here. Now I’ve been reading everything I could find about gamma, YCbCr>RGB conversions, etc., only to get more and more confused because of differing and contradicting opinions. So I decided to go the empirical way and try all sorts of settings and workflows, and now I got more and more surprised. Examples:

1. Setting the Levels FX on the output and leaving everything at 1.0 resulted in images that were a bit lighter and had more sparkle, although no change was of course expected.

2. Frame-serving from Vegas to a second instance of Vegas (doing the MPEG-2 rendering) resulted in images that were much lighter and almost acceptable. So, I’ll stick to workflow #2 for the time being even if the smart rendering advantage is lost.

I’ve been working with hard- and software since 1975 but I’m understanding less every day.

Lou